Best selling graphic novelist Alison Bechdel’s Spent is a laugh-out-loud example of autofiction at its best, tackling serious topics of our present moment while poking fun at herself and her milieu, the world of aging Boomer leftist (mostly) lesbians in rural Vermont.
I’ve been along for the ride with Bechdel since her wildly successful and deeply serious graphic memoir Fun Home was published in 2006. It wasn’t the first ever graphic memoir, but it was one of the first to gain traction with a large slice of the American reading public and be recognized by the critics as an important work of literature. She’d been working on it for seven years, all the while publishing her underground comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” which drew on the lives of her group of mostly lesbian young adult friends and lovers.
Spent is a return to her comic roots in the way it draws on some of the characters or types from the “Dykes” strips, and also in that it’s really funny. Fun Home was the “tragi-comic” story of her childhood in a repressive home with an aloof mother, a closeted gay father, and a growing recognition of her own lesbianism. Are You My Mother? is an even heavier read, dealing with the adult Alison’s attempts to establish a relationship with her mother and to understand through therapy what happened during her childhood and how it affected her adult life. The Secret to Superhuman Strength I found to be a digression of sorts (TBF, maybe that’s just because I’ve never been tempted by fitness fads myself), as Bechdel explores her obsession with personal fitness, the way she takes on and then abandons one activity after another, and her realization that she gets in her own way a lot.
All of those previous comic memoirs were leavened with humor, but I actually laughed out loud a lot as I read Spent. It’s the fictionalized story of a graphic artist named Alison Bechdel who runs a pygmy goat rescue farm in Vermont with her wife Holly. (The goat part is an invention.) The real Bechdel’s wife Holly is a painter who did the coloring of the art in Spent, but the book’s Holly is an upbeat advocate of strenuous outdoor living whose online woodchopping instructionals briefly make her a viral video star.
Real Alison’s father was an English teacher and mortician. This fictional Alison’s father was a taxidermist who ran afoul of endangered species protection laws and spent time in federal prison. Her graphic memoir Death and Taxidermy has become a hit streaming TV series (which finances the goat farm) but which after several seasons has gone off the rails and now includes dragons. Her experience with being run over by Hollywood (and other parts of her life) prompt Alison to start writing a book about the evils of capitalism, though she’s having trouble focusing on it because of her busy life: raising goats, filming Holly’s videos, and interacting with friends in the local queer community, many of whom live communally in a big house in Burlington.
The lives of those friends is a major subplot: one bi couple find themselves sexually attracted to an old friend who has come back into their lives, and their non-binary offspring is failing at college because of their activism. And of course everybody is still dealing with the strictures of the Covid pandemic and the fallout from the first Trump term (the story is set in about 2022).
The situations and characters offer a lot of grist for humor, which Bechdel is expert at using without resorting to punchlines. Where she really delivers this time is in the art, which in many ways resembles the nearly over the top style of Mad magazine back in the day. The excesses of progressive consumerism are gleefully skewered through things like the abundance and types of milk alternatives (oat milk, goat milk, stoat milk, flax milk, hemp milk, straw bale milk, drywall milk), broth (bone broth, tendon broth, ligament broth) and stuffing mixes (gluten free, gluten free with sage & sawdust, gluten free with chaff & chalk, and “embrace the bloat Gluten Glop Stuffin’!) at the local co-op grocery. It pays to examine every cell for little marginal jokes — as they drive through New York after a holiday visit to Alison’s old home in Pennsylvania, the “Welcome to New York” sign notes that it is “a Bechdel-free zone.”
Will the TV show that pays the bills be get a sixth season? What about Alison’s proposal for a reality show on how to free yourself from consumerism? Is Holly flirting with the cute new veterinarian? Will their friends’ new “throuple” alienate their kid and upset their communal household? Lots of little plot strands keep you turning the pages. But mostly it’s Bechdel’s wry but humane observations about humans and human nature that keep you with her. This version of Alison Bechdel really does live in a Fun House.
(HarperCollins/Mariner Books, 2025)
